Tag: publishing

June 10, 2012

As the online editor, I s…

As the online editor, I sometimes feel like my job is to make something beautiful, just to hack it apart for kindling. Here’s the way I (mostly) think about it instead: any link to a fragment of LQ is a breadcrumb that can bring you back to the whole. Every magazine wants to lead you back to the mothership, but when you finally pick up an issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, what you have isn’t the end of your own curation and the beginning of our vision. It’s the start of a new reading in a closed-off sphere that also resembles the web you came from: a rabbit hole of thought that you’ll gladly fall into.

Michelle Legro – History and Its Contents.

May 28, 2012

Hack the Cover

If digital covers as we know them are so ‘dead,’ why do we hold them so gingerly? Treat them like print covers? We can’t hurt them. They’re dead. So let’s start hacking. Pull them apart, cut them into bits and see what we come up with.

This is an essay for book lovers and designers curious about where the cover has been, where it’s going, and what the ethos of covers means for digital book design. It’s for those of us dissatisfied with thoughtlessly transferring print assets to digital and closing our eyes.

The cover as we know it really is — gasp — ‘dead.’ But it’s dead because the way we touch digital books is different than the way we touch physical books. And once you acknowledge that, useful corollaries emerge.

Craig Mod – Hack the Cover.

May 28, 2012

Improving the Digital Reading Experience.

May 25, 2012

We need to reinvent the article. Sean Blanda illustrates that it’s time to rethink not just the article but how information is published on the web. I agree. My favorite narratives are those that answer long, winding questions by telling a story. They are more akin to a short book than a news story. This recent New Yorker piece is 50 pages and over 20,000 words when I drop it in to Pages.app. I loved that article, but defaulting to the same mental model and design presentation for a few hundred word piece about NFL draft trades is ludicrous.

March 12, 2012

Some news is slow

There’s a big bug in our news system.

We like to say it’s a 24-hour news cycle. And maybe it is, but there’s real news, stuff that effects our lives, that happens over a much longer span of time. Boring or not, we have to keep cycling back to it, for our own good.

Dave Winer – Some news is slow.

February 27, 2012

Deploy. An essay by Mandy Brown that asks how we can more effectively create living texts.

February 17, 2012

On Content: less is more. Sean Blanda nails it here. Great set of guidelines for any writer to aspire to. I wish more publications understood and followed these ideas.

January 9, 2012

The Dirt on Editorial Calendars. Tips for making the most of editorial calendars. Ties in nicely with the updated version of Edit Flow released today. Lots of improvements to the calendar in that release.

January 9, 2012

The Value of Content, Part 1: Adam Smith never expected this. Melissa Rach takes a look at how content on the web defies traditional models of economics. In part 2 she explains the basics of effectively communicating the value of content. Sections 2 and 3 of Part 2 are particularly good. Part 2 is here.

January 2, 2012

Publish for people, not to them

Part of the job of a publisher today is to facilitate discussion—and that means being a part of it. It means that we publish for people, not to them.

Mandy Brown – Babies and the Bathwater.